Well there are two main legal areas you're looking at:Innovation...

Well there are two main legal areas you're looking at:

Innovation and Clean Tech/Energy Efficiency/ Renewable Energy (Which I will call Environmental Legislation)

Grants are appropriate for some stages of innovation - however - in order to see widespread technology deployment you need a legal framework (consisting of enviro legislation) that overcomes the barriers inherent in our legal/institutional structure.

These inherent barriers are called carbon lock-in. For example, the way that the grid is regulated (in Australia) by the AEMC and AER is an example of carbon lock in. The current rules, in contrast to most european countries, force the entire burden of connecting to the grid on to new clean energy generators. This is called deep charging. A few years ago there was a serious attempt from within the AEMC to institute law reform (the AEMC makes "rules" which have the power of law by virtue of the National Electricity South Australia Act and Mirror legislation in the other eastern states).

So, you need laws to smooth out this kind of inherent advantage. Another example is the billions (literally) of subsisidies we pay to polluting industries each year. Needless to say, if CFU received 1% of these subsidies every year we could forget about the need for capital raising altogether. A third example is the failure to price in the external damage of burning carbon especially coal, which a recent article in the Australian Economic review found was a lot higher than the damage caused by CO2.

Once you wipe the makeup off the pig that is coal fired generation, alternative clean technologies, despite their simple rags, start looking a whole lot more attractive.

I'm putting together an executive summary at the moment so let me know if you want it.